building banks with shavings

lamprellsarah

horsey and happy
Jul 21, 2000
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Ware (in Hertfordshire)
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my mare is going to come in next Friday and go on shavings.
but the other day i put her in her stable, she pulled all the shavings around and rolled, the banks got demolished and they weren't big enough anyway!!!

anyone got any tips or ideas,???how to make the banks big enough and to stay there????
she's a big horse and i am frightened she will get herself cast!!
 
Shavings take a little while to compact, but if you just keep piling them up again without forking the base you can build them up. The only thing you have to watch is that if you can't toss them about as you're supposed to they can get a bit musty, so you need to keep any eye on them. I had the same problem as you - big horses just trash fresh banks so you have to make them fairly solid otherwise you may as well not have them at all. One good thing is that mice aren't so keen to nest in shavings!
 
shavings are annoying when the walls get demolished! This may sound crazy but it works for me, when you have made the banks along the wall, pat them hard against the wall make sure you have quite a lot of shavings and keep patting them hard into the sides of the stable and hopefully it will work for you and they won't all fall back down again! I know it sounds mad patting shavings but hopefully it will work for you too!
 
Stamping on them works too. The idea is to compact them so they stay together like they do in the bale before you lay the bed (you know when you take the plastic off and the bale kind of stays together in lumps). Then they are more difficult to trash!

Some horses will make it a mission in life to trash them. May did when we had to keep her in to treat her eye; she dug them out until in the morning there was hardly any bedding round the walls and a huge mound in the middle where she'd scraped it. We mixed it with shredded paper in the end, with shavings as a top layer - the shreds are longer and more difficult to dig.
 
i do the same as Tarkia - ie put the sides in then compact them down using the broom like a hammer - i then top them up if necessary and re-compact and then i fill the middle with shavings - seems to work quite well for my mares:)
 
At the end of the day banks don't work anyway. A horse will still get cast no matter how big they are. Just make the bed thick enough so that if you horse does get cast, it shouldnt scrape itself on the floor.
 
I don't use banks -- ever since my horse bowed out the stable wall getting up & down last winter. I have rubber matting down as well as shavings though.

The wall has been re-inforced as well.
 
I agree, banks won't really stop a determined horse from getting cast, but they do give you a bit of margin, and I like mine to have something to keep them off the wall if they lean against it when they lie down as they're wont to do. And of course in some stables they can make a nice draught excluder.

(I don't think Ginny Leng bothers with them if I remember rightly from the one time I saw one of her stable management videos.)
 
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